First Reading is an audio podcast to help you preach with confidence from the Hebrew Bible. We equip you with relevant linguistic, historical, and literary background for each week’s Old Testament lesson (the “first reading”) as scheduled in the Revised Common Lectionary. With help from our guests—some of the best thinkers and teachers in modern biblical scholarship—each episode probes some of the central questions raised by the text, and offers a couple potential angles for preaching it.
We want to see a community of clergy and congregations who have formative access to both testaments of Scripture. Our hope is that this weekly resource can help encourage more preachers to craft sermons that open up the Old Testament to their congregations!
The RCL is an ecumenical schedule of selected biblical texts to be read over a three-year cycle. See the whole schedule here.
You may also be interested in The Narrative Lectionary, which covers the narrative portions of the Bible in a four-year cycle. While we are currently following the RCL, the lectionaries intersect from time to time.
